You shipped the product. Now you have to sell it, and nobody else is going to write the landing page, plan the launch, fix the SEO or send the investor update.
Start here: install the free coreyhaines31/marketingskills (GTM, launch, CRO, customer research) and garrytan/gstack (product thinking and shipping), then add the investor-materials skill from affaan-m/ECC when you raise. Paid packs are optional. If you sell services to clients rather than a product, the skills for freelancers guide fits better.
A skill is a folder with a SKILL.md file that teaches Claude a repeatable job. Install the right ten and you have something close to a junior marketing team that follows written playbooks.
This guide covers the skills worth installing in November 2026, free and paid. Every GitHub star count and last-push date below came from the GitHub API on 1 November 2026. Every price came from the live product page on the same day. Every install command was checked against the repo README.
What are the best Claude Code skills for founders?
Short answer: for most founders, start with three free sources: coreyhaines31/marketingskills for go-to-market, launch, CRO and customer research; garrytan/gstack for product thinking and shipping; and affaan-m/ECC for its investor-materials skill. Add AgriciDaniel/claude-seo when organic search matters. Paid packs are optional.
If you are new to the format, read what Claude Code skills are first. The short version: skills live in ~/.claude/skills/ (global) or .claude/skills/ (per project), or they arrive inside a plugin. Claude reads the skill’s description and loads it when your request matches.
The shortlist at a glance
| Skill or pack | Best for | Free or paid | Stars (1 Nov 2026) | Last push |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| garrytan/gstack | Founder thinking, plan review, shipping | Free (MIT) | 138,565 | 2026-11-01 |
| coreyhaines31/marketingskills | GTM, launch, CRO, customer research | Free (MIT) | 57,803 | 2026-10-31 |
| affaan-m/ECC | Pitch decks, investor memos, outreach | Free (MIT) | 294,589 | 2026-10-30 |
| AgriciDaniel/claude-seo | SEO audits and fixes | Free (MIT) | 25,386 | 2026-11-01 |
| alirezarezvani/claude-skills | C-level advisor and product skills | Free (MIT) | 29,110 | 2026-10-31 |
| anthropics/knowledge-work-plugins | Official marketing, small-business, PM plugins | Free (Apache-2.0) | 34,325 | 2026-11-01 |
| ognjengt/founder-skills | GTM plans, outreach, social posts | Free (MIT) | 654 | 2026-05-18 |
| onewave-ai/claude-skills | Includes an investor-update writer | Free (MIT) | 405 | 2026-10-20 |
| Inflectual Master Marketing Skills Bundle | Packaged marketing skills | Paid, $167 one-time | n/a | n/a |
| Ultimate Claude SEO & AEO Skills Pack | SEO and answer-engine skills | Paid, $39 (listed against $79) | n/a | n/a |
| SuperSkills | 139-skill general pack | Paid, $50 one-time | n/a | n/a |
Takeaway: stars measure attention, not fit. A 654-star repo with the exact skill you need beats a 290,000-star repo you will never open.
Why founders need skills instead of better prompts
Direct answer: a prompt is a one-off request; a skill is a saved process. Founders repeat the same marketing jobs every week (positioning, page edits, launch posts, update emails), and rewriting the method from memory each time is where quality slips. A skill stores the method once and Claude applies it the same way every time.
Here is the pain, stated plainly. As a solo founder or a two-person team you are the marketing department by default. Most founders did not train for it. The result tends to look the same:
- The landing page lists features because that is what you built, not what the buyer wants.
- Launch day arrives with no plan for comments, follow-up or directories.
- SEO is “later”, and later never comes.
- Investor updates go out late, or not at all, because each one starts from a blank page.
- Customer interviews happen, but nobody turns the notes into copy.
A generic chatbot can help with any of these, but only as well as your prompt. Skills move the expertise into the file. Corey Haines’s customer-research skill, for example, lists “Reddit mining”, “G2 reviews”, “jobs to be done” and “PMF survey” in its trigger description, so Claude knows the method before you explain it.
There is a second, quieter benefit. Skills compose. gstack’s README describes /office-hours writing a design doc “the other skills read”. That shared context is what makes a stack feel like a team rather than a pile of tools.
What this does not fix: skills do not give you distribution, an audience or product-market fit. They make the work you already have to do faster and more consistent. Treat any claim that a skill pack “replaces a marketing team” as unconfirmed.
Takeaway: install skills for the jobs you repeat, not for jobs you might do one day.
Go-to-market without a marketing team
Direct answer: for go-to-market planning, install coreyhaines31/marketingskills and run its product-marketing, marketing-plan, pricing and launch skills in that order. If you want a lighter option, ognjengt/founder-skills has a go-to-market-plan skill that asks diagnostic questions and returns three strategies.
coreyhaines31/marketingskills (free)
This is the most complete free marketing library for Claude Code we found. The skills/ folder held 50 skills on 1 November 2026, including product-marketing, marketing-plan, pricing, offers, launch, cro, copywriting, customer-research, seo-audit, ai-seo, cold-email, directory-submissions and competitor-profiling.
Install (from the README):
npx skills add coreyhaines31/marketingskills
# or pick skills
npx skills add coreyhaines31/marketingskills --skill launch customer-researchPlugin route: /plugin marketplace add coreyhaines31/marketingskills then /plugin install marketing-skills.
ognjengt/founder-skills (free)
A smaller pack aimed at founders and creators. Its README lists go-to-market-plan, strategic-planning, competitor-intel, outreach-specialist, cro-optimization, brand-copywriter, x-writer and linkedin-writer, among others. The author also offers it through a free sign-up page at saasstrats.com. It had not been pushed to since 18 May 2026, so expect fewer updates.
npx skills add https://github.com/ognjengt/founder-skillsA GTM order of operations
- Positioning first. Run
product-marketingto write who it is for, the alternative they use today, and why you are different. - Offer and pricing. Run
pricingandoffersbefore you write any page. - Channel plan. Run
marketing-planorgo-to-market-planand force it to pick two channels, not eight. - Assets. Only now write the page, emails and posts.
Growth-minded founders should also read Claude Code skills for growth marketers and skills for product marketers.
Takeaway: most founder marketing fails at positioning, so make the first skill you run a positioning skill.
Landing pages that convert
Direct answer: use the cro and copywriting skills from coreyhaines31/marketingskills to write and audit the page, and gstack’s design-html and landing-report skills if you want Claude to build and review the actual HTML. founder-skills adds a cro-optimization skill that scores a page against 13 CRO principles.
A landing page is two jobs: what it says and how it is built. Founders who code tend to over-invest in the second. The skills split cleanly:
| Job | Skill | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Write the copy | copywriting | marketingskills |
| Audit an existing page | cro | marketingskills |
| Score against CRO principles | cro-optimization | founder-skills |
| Signup flow friction | signup, onboarding | marketingskills |
| Build the page in HTML | design-html | gstack |
| Review a page build | landing-report | gstack |
| Official option | marketing plugin | anthropics/knowledge-work-plugins |
A practical loop: feed the customer-research output (real customer phrases) into copywriting, ship, then run cro against the live URL a week later. That loop matters more than any single skill.
For deeper coverage of copy, see Claude Code skills for landing page copy and skills for copywriters.
What to watch: CRO skills give you hypotheses, not results. Any “conversion lift” number a skill or pack promises is unconfirmed until you measure it on your own traffic.
Takeaway: write from customer words, build fast, audit after real visitors arrive.
Launch: Product Hunt, Hacker News and directories
Direct answer: the launch skill in coreyhaines31/marketingskills names Product Hunt, beta launches, waitlists and launch checklists in its trigger description. Pair it with directory-submissions, which covers Product Hunt, BetaList, AlternativeTo, SaaSHub and AI directories. No skill we checked is dedicated to Hacker News, so treat HN as a manual job with skill support.
What the launch skills cover
launch: launch strategy, feature announcements, pre-launch QA, changelog and release notes.directory-submissions: the directory layer of a launch, including backlinks and a directory tracker.community-marketingandsocial: posts for the communities where your buyers already are.x-writerandlinkedin-writer(founder-skills): launch-day posts in several formats.
Hacker News needs a different voice
Show HN rewards plain technical writing and punishes marketing tone. That is a style problem, so a brand-voice skill helps more than a launch skill. Use the official brand-voice plugin in anthropics/knowledge-work-plugins (listed by Tribe AI as the partner author), or write a short house-style skill yourself with our guide to building a skill. Ask it to strip adjectives, lead with what the thing does, and state limits openly.
A launch-week checklist
| When | Task | Skill |
|---|---|---|
| T-14 days | Positioning and launch plan | product-marketing, launch |
| T-7 days | Directory list and assets | directory-submissions |
| T-3 days | Launch posts and emails | social, emails, x-writer |
| Launch day | Plain-voice Show HN post | brand-voice or your own skill |
| T+3 days | Recap, changelog, follow-ups | launch |
Takeaway: skills prepare the assets; the comments and replies on launch day are still you.
SEO basics for founders
Direct answer: install AgriciDaniel/claude-seo for technical and on-page audits, or use the seo-audit, ai-seo, schema and programmatic-seo skills already inside coreyhaines31/marketingskills. For answer-engine work, the paid Contra SEO and AEO pack ($39) is an option, but the free repos cover the basics.
Founders rarely need advanced SEO in month one. You need a crawlable site, clean titles, schema, and a few pages that answer what your buyers search. That is exactly what the free skills do.
AgriciDaniel/claude-seo (free)
A plugin focused on SEO auditing. Install from the README:
/plugin marketplace add AgriciDaniel/claude-seo
/plugin install claude-seo@agricidaniel-claude-seoWhat to run, in order
seo-auditon your live site.schemato add Organization, Product and FAQ markup.site-architecturebefore you add a blog.ai-seoso answer engines can quote you.programmatic-seoonly once you have a data source worth templating.
Vendor MCP servers (Ahrefs, Semrush and others) can feed real keyword data into these skills, but they require that vendor’s paid plan. Check the vendor’s own pricing page; we did not list prices we could not confirm.
More here: Claude Code skills for SEO and skills for keyword research.
Takeaway: a free audit plus schema covers most of what an early-stage site needs.
Investor updates and pitch decks
Direct answer: use the investor-materials skill from affaan-m/ECC for decks, one-pagers, memos and accelerator applications, plus its investor-outreach skill. For monthly updates, onewave-ai/claude-skills has an investor-update-writer. Anthropic’s official pptx skill in anthropics/skills turns the outline into a slide file.
The investor-materials description says it covers “pitch decks, one-pagers, investor memos, accelerator applications, financial models” and materials that “must stay internally consistent”. That consistency point is the real value: your deck, memo and data room should quote the same numbers.
Install the full ECC plugin (from the README):
/plugin marketplace add https://github.com/affaan-m/ECC
/plugin install ecc@eccECC is large. If you only want the one skill, community registries such as skills.sh list it under affaan-m/ECC/investor-materials, which suggests npx skills add affaan-m/ECC --skill investor-materials; that form is not in the README, so confirm it before relying on it.
Other options
c-level-advisorinalirezarezvani/claude-skills: CEO, CTO and other advisor skills for board prep and strategy.financeandsmall-businessplugins inanthropics/knowledge-work-plugins: the small-business plugin includescash-flow-snapshot,business-pulseandreport-pack, which help assemble the numbers section.stakeholder-updatein the officialproduct-managementplugin: a general-purpose update format.
Official install pattern (from the README): claude plugin marketplace add anthropics/knowledge-work-plugins then claude plugin install sales@knowledge-work-plugins, swapping sales for small-business, finance, marketing or product-management.
Hard rule: never let a skill invent metrics. Paste your real numbers in, and check every figure in the draft against your books before it goes to investors.
Takeaway: one consistent set of numbers, reused across deck, memo and monthly update.
Customer research on autopilot (almost)
Direct answer: the customer-research skill in coreyhaines31/marketingskills handles interview analysis, survey synthesis, review mining, Reddit mining, personas and JTBD. The official product-management plugin adds synthesize-research. competitor-profiling and founder-skills’ competitor-intel cover the competitor side.
Customer research is the input every other skill depends on. Copy, positioning and launch posts all get better when they use the buyer’s own words.
A workflow that fits a founder’s week:
- Drop call transcripts or notes into a project folder.
- Run
customer-researchand ask for pains, desired outcomes and exact phrases, each tagged with its source. - Run
competitor-profilingon the two products buyers mention most. - Feed both outputs to
product-marketingandcopywriting.
One founder on Reddit described building debrief and task skills from their own investor and design-partner calls (an unverified forum report, via a mirrored thread). That pattern, writing a skill around your own recurring calls, is often the best skill you will install.
Takeaway: research skills earn their keep only when their output feeds the next skill.
gstack and other founder skill suites
Direct answer: gstack (garrytan/gstack) is Garry Tan’s open-source skill suite for Claude Code, MIT-licensed, with 138,565 stars on 1 November 2026. It is built around shipping product: /office-hours challenges your framing and writes a design doc, /plan-ceo-review and /autoplan review plans, and /ship runs tests, review and the PR.
gstack is not a marketing pack. It is closer to a founder’s operating system for building, with a few skills that touch marketing (design-html, landing-report, make-pdf, document-release, retro). Its strength for non-engineering work is /office-hours: a forcing function for the question “should this exist, and for whom?”
Install (from the README; it needs Git and Bun):
git clone --single-branch --depth 1 https://github.com/garrytan/gstack.git ~/.claude/skills/gstack && cd ~/.claude/skills/gstack && ./setupHow the suites compare
| Suite | Focus | Install style | Fit for founders |
|---|---|---|---|
| gstack | Product thinking, review, shipping | git clone + ./setup | Technical founders |
| ECC (formerly everything-claude-code) | Very broad, includes investor skills | Plugin ecc@ecc | Founders who want one big install |
| alirezarezvani/claude-skills | C-level advisors, product, marketing | Plugin marketplace | Founders wanting advisor-style prompts |
| founder-skills | GTM, outreach, social | npx skills add | Non-technical founders |
| knowledge-work-plugins | Official, function-based plugins | claude plugin install | Anyone wanting Anthropic-maintained code |
For directories, ComposioHQ/awesome-claude-skills (78,504 stars) is a curated list, and sites such as claudemarketplaces.com, claudskills.com and cultofclaude.com index community skills. Treat registry listings as discovery, not endorsement, and read each SKILL.md before installing, as Snyk’s founder-skills guide also advises.
Takeaway: pick one suite as your base and add single skills on top; stacking three giant suites creates overlapping triggers.
Free vs paid: is a paid pack worth it?
Direct answer: for most founders, no, not at first. The free repos above cover GTM, launch, landing pages, SEO, research and investor materials. A paid pack makes sense when you want one curated bundle and a seller to ask questions, and you have checked its contents match a gap.
| Option | Price (checked 1 Nov 2026) | What you get | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| marketingskills | Free | 50 marketing skills | Default GTM base |
| gstack | Free | Founder build and review suite | Technical founders |
| ECC | Free | Huge pack incl. investor skills | Fundraising materials |
| claude-seo | Free | SEO audit plugin | Organic search |
| knowledge-work-plugins | Free | Official function plugins | Maintained basics |
| founder-skills | Free (repo; email sign-up on site) | 20+ founder skills | Non-technical founders |
| Inflectual Master Marketing Skills Bundle (Gumroad) | $167 one-time | Packaged marketing skills | Teams wanting a curated bundle |
| Ultimate Claude SEO & AEO Skills Pack (Contra) | $39, shown against $79 | SEO and AEO skills | SEO-heavy founders |
| SuperSkills | $50 one-time, 1 year of updates per the site | 139 general skills | Broad coverage in one purchase |
We left out at least one heavily promoted pack because its sales page used countdown-style urgency. No result claims from paid sellers are repeated here; treat any such claims as unconfirmed.
Takeaway: spend money on a pack only after a free skill has shown you exactly what is missing.
Your one-person marketing stack
Direct answer: a workable founder stack has seven layers: research, positioning, page, launch, SEO, updates and review. Each layer maps to one or two skills, all of which are free.
| Layer | Skill | Cadence |
|---|---|---|
| Research | customer-research, competitor-profiling | Monthly |
| Positioning | product-marketing, /office-hours | Quarterly |
| Page | copywriting, cro | Per change |
| Launch | launch, directory-submissions | Per release |
| SEO | claude-seo or seo-audit | Monthly |
| Content and social | social, emails, linkedin-writer | Weekly |
| Investors | investor-materials, investor-update-writer | Monthly |
Common mistakes
- Installing everything. Overlapping descriptions make Claude pick the wrong skill.
- Skipping research. Copy skills cannot invent your customer’s words.
- Trusting numbers in drafts. Every metric needs a source you control.
- Never updating. Re-run
npx skills addor update plugins when repos move. - Not writing your own. Your best skill is often a 40-line file describing your own process.
Non-technical founders should start with Claude Code skills for non-developers and how to install Claude Code skills. For broader picks, see Claude Code skills for marketers, and for outbound, skills for sales teams and email marketing skills.
Takeaway: seven layers, one owner, a weekly rhythm.
FAQ
What are Claude Code skills?
Folders containing a SKILL.md file with instructions, and sometimes scripts, that Claude loads when a request matches the skill’s description.
Where do skills live?
In ~/.claude/skills/ for all projects or .claude/skills/ for one project. Plugins install skills for you.
How do I install a skill?
Run npx skills add owner/repo, use /plugin marketplace add owner/repo then /plugin install name, or copy the folder into your skills directory.
Are Claude Code skills free?
Most are. The repos in this guide are MIT or Apache-2.0. Paid packs exist, from $39 to $167 in our checks.
Do I need to code to use them?
No. You need to open a terminal and run Claude Code. Writing skills is plain Markdown.
What is gstack?
Garry Tan’s open-source Claude Code skill suite for planning, reviewing and shipping software, installed with git clone and ./setup.
Is gstack good for marketing?
Partly. It is product-focused. Use it for positioning and page builds, and a marketing pack for the rest.
Can Claude Code write my pitch deck?
It can draft the narrative and slides with investor-materials and the official pptx skill. You supply and check every number.
Can Claude write investor updates?
Yes, with investor-update-writer or stakeholder-update. Paste your real metrics; never let it estimate them.
Which skill helps with a Product Hunt launch?
The launch and directory-submissions skills in coreyhaines31/marketingskills both name Product Hunt.
Is there a Hacker News skill?
We found no dedicated one. Use a plain-voice brand skill and write the Show HN post yourself.
Can skills do SEO for a startup site?
They can audit, add schema and draft pages. Rankings depend on your site and competition, so no skill can promise them.
Are third-party skills safe?
Read the SKILL.md and any scripts first. Skills can run code, so install from sources you trust.
What is the difference between a skill and an MCP server?
A skill is instructions. An MCP server is a connection to an outside tool or data source, such as an SEO vendor.
How many skills should I install?
Start with five to ten that match jobs you do weekly. Add more when you hit a gap.
Are paid skill packs worth it?
Only after free skills show a clear gap. Read the contents list before buying, and avoid pages with countdown timers.
Sources and methodology
- GitHub API (
gh api repos/OWNER/REPO), queried 1 November 2026, for stars, last push and licence. - READMEs of gstack, marketingskills, claude-seo, ECC (formerly everything-claude-code), founder-skills and knowledge-work-plugins for install commands.
SKILL.mddescriptions forlaunch,customer-research,directory-submissionsandinvestor-materials.- Live product pages for Inflectual on Gumroad (price meta: 167.0 USD), Contra and SuperSkills, checked 1 November 2026.
- Snyk: top Claude skills for founders for the read-before-install advice.
No skill in this guide was benchmarked by us, and we report no usage results.
Your next step
Pick one job you will do this week. Install the matching free skill, run it on real material, and keep it only if the output is better than your own first draft. Then add the next layer.
